Lake Cheko in the Siberian region of Tunguska has recently emerged
as a candidate for an “impact site”
linked to the famous Tunguska explosion of 1908. Credit: www-th.bo.infn.it/tunguska
/ University of Bologna

Jul 05, 2007

New Tunguska Crater Found?

A team of Italian scientists has announced seismic evidence of
what could be meteor fragments beneath Lake Cheko in Siberia--the
first "solid evidence" of a Tunguska asteroid.

On June 30,
1908, a massive explosion detonated in the skies over
Tunguska in northern Siberia. The resulting shock wave
flattened some 60 million trees across 2000 square
kilometers. The blast was heard hundreds of miles away and
the cloud of dust colored the skies of the Northern
Hemisphere for months afterwards.

The first
expedition to investigate the region could not locate any
sign of an impact event, nor did it recover any meteoric
fragments. A later expedition, however, did uncover
magnetite globules and various forms of silicate globules
embedded in the earth and in the trees.

Most scientists
eventually settled on either an icy comet explosively
vaporized before reaching the surface, or a small rocky
asteroid exploding in the atmosphere and leaving no
appreciable fragments. But the absence of definitive
evidence for an impact invited many exotic theories--ranging
from “mirror-matter” or a tiny “quantum black hole,” to an
exploding alien craft or a Nikola Tesla experiment gone
awry.

In past
discussions of the
Tunguska event, our Picture of the Day editors have
suggested
electric discharge between a small comet or asteroid and
the Earth. That suggestion was based on a wide variety of
recorded physical effects and the testimony of human
witnesses.

More recently,
however, a team of Italian researchers has suggested that
the 164-foot deep Lake Cheko, five miles northwest of the
epicenter of the blast, could be the site of an impact by a
meteor or a fragment of the body responsible for the
devastating Tunguska event.

The team
reported that
3D sonar images of the lake’s bottom indicate that it is
funnel-shaped, something that might be expected of both an
impactor and an electric discharge. Using seismic detectors,
the University of Bologna scientists discovered an
area of greater density beneath the lake, noting that
this could indicate the remains of a meteor. "When we looked
at the bottom of the lake, we measured seismic waves
reflecting off of something," said Giuseppe Longo, a
physicist at the University of Bologna in Italy and
co-author of the study. "Nobody has found this before. We
can only explain that and the shape of the lake as a
low-velocity impact crater."

According to a
report on the
Space.com web site, however, some physicists are
skeptical about the small size of the Lake Cheko crater. "We
know from the entry physics that the largest and most
energetic objects penetrate deepest," said David Morrison,
an astronomer with NASA's Ames Research Center. Morrison
wondered aloud why only a fragment of the main explosion
would reach the ground to make a relatively small crater,
while the greater portion would not create a larger main
crater.

But Alan Harris,
a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute, points
out that, in 1947, the Russian Sikhote-Alin meteorite
created 100 small craters. Some were 20 meters (66 feet)
across. A site in Poland also exists, he explained, where a
large meteor exploded and created a series of small lakes.
"If the fragment was traveling slowly enough, there's
actually a good chance [the Italian team) will unearth some
meteorite material," Harris said.

The researchers
will return to Tunguska this summer with plans to drill
beneath the bottom of Lake Cheko, hoping to find a
meteorite. From an Electric Universe perspective, if the
Tunguska explosion was the result of an electric discharge,
a meteor fragment may indeed be found, pointing to the
source of the discharge. But more likely, the increased
density beneath the lake could be the signature of the
electric arc that excavated the depression, producing the
fused sands and soils of a fulgurite.

Authors David Talbott and Wallace
Thornhill introduce the reader to an age of planetary instability
and earthshaking electrical events in ancient times. If their
hypothesis is correct, it could not fail to alter many paths of
scientific investigation.

Professor
of engineering Donald Scott systematically unravels the myths of the
"Big Bang" cosmology, and he does so without resorting to black
holes, dark matter, dark energy, neutron stars, magnetic
"reconnection", or any other fictions needed to prop up a failed
theory.

In
language designed for scientists and non-scientists alike, authors
Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott show that even the greatest
surprises of the space age are predictable patterns in an electric
universe.